Saturday, September 12, 2015

If today
is the birthday of humanity, then we have two obligations: 1) To thank Gd for
our existence, as we do in the davening, and 2) To ask ourselves: Why are we
here? What is the purpose of the brilliant, inventive, moody, creative, ambitious,
bizarre creature that is the human being?

Fortunately,
we don’t need to start on this question from scratch – this is a 14-minute
derashah, not a shiur. I want to show you three sources, which carry a message
of such power that it has changed my life, and which I believe can change our
Rosh HaShanah birthday for all of us.

Rabbi
Chaim of Volozhin

First, Rabbi
Chaim of Volozhin, with words that are among the most inspirational I have ever
heard.

Rav Chaim
Volozhiner was the greatest student of the Vilna Gaon, toward the end of the 18th
century. He founded the Volozhin yeshiva, the top yeshiva in Europe,
famed for training intellectual geniuses; it is reported that the entrance exam
included putting a pin through a gemara and telling the examiner, without
looking, what word the pin had pierced on every page. Rav Chaim started the
great Brisker dynasty, which produced the brilliant Soloveitchik family.

And Rav
Chaim’s son, Rav Yitzchak, wrote the following about his father:[1]

This is what my father always
told me: "This is a person's entire purpose. A person is not created
for himself. A person is created only to benefit others, with whatever power is
in his possession."[2]

The uber-intellectual
declared to his son: You are not here on earth to be a genius. You are not here
on earth to ace the pin test. Not to minimize the importance of learning Torah, but to maximize the importance of chesed: You are here on this earth to look at the person
beside you and ask yourself, “What can I do to make his life better?”

Rav
Yerucham Levovitz

Second,
Rav Yerucham Levovitz, expanding on an idea stated by Rav Simcha Zissel Broide,
also known as the Sabba miKelm.[3]

Rav Simcha
Zissel Broide was a brilliant talmid chacham. My Beit Midrash is learning
Eruvin this year, and we have the newest edition of the Meiri on Eruvin, a
fairly technical and esoteric text – and it comes with scholarly footnotes from Rav Simcha
Zissel Broide.

As far as Rav
Levovitz, he was the Mashgiach Ruchani (spiritual leader) of the Mir Yeshiva in
the first decades of the 20th century. The Mir Yeshiva is another
institution famed for its Torah scholarship, and Rav Levovitz is honoured as
one of its greatest leaders.

Bearing
a burden with others is of such importance because this is the entire Torah:
the joining of souls, to feel what each other feels. All of Torah study, all of
the learning and all of the deeds - the final goal is that all souls should be
joined, to feel each others’ feelings, to truly be one.

Faced with identifying the purpose of the
entire Torah, with all of its laws and rituals, Rav Levovitz, leader of one
of the major European yeshivot, identified not our personal connection
with Gd, and not Torah study, but bearing each other’s burdens with
them! Not that he was diminishing the importance of Torah study, or saying that it is sufficieent to just “be a good person”. Just the opposite – it is critical that we practice all of our mitzvot, and that we examine them to gain an understanding of how they will help us to benefit others, and to bring people to greater empathy. Hashem gave us the Torah in order to instill empathy in our hearts
and lives.

Rabbi
Moshe Cordovero

And third,
Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, one of the greatest kabbalists of the past 500 years. He
was a leader of the community of kabbalists in Tzfat, and a Rebbe of the Ari
z”l. One of his great works is Tomer Devorah, “The Palm Tree of Devorah”, which
speaks of the ability of a human being to emulate Gd.

In Tomer
Devorah, Rabbi Cordovero wrote that when the Torah says a human being is
created in the image of Gd, this means that we hold within our hearts, our
minds, our limbs, the capacity to emulate the actions of G-d in our
relationships with others.

He wrote, “האדם ראוי שיתדמה לקונו, A person is suited to resemble his
Creator.” Not that
this is something we need to leap for, to struggle to achieve – we are suited
for this. And specifically, to resemble our Creator in the way we relate to the
human beings around us, the way that Gd reached out to save Yishmael in
this morning’s Torah reading – with mercy, with generosity, with empathy,
with love.

And he
added powerfully, אילו ידומה בגופו
ולא בפעולות,
if a person were to have the physical capacity to reach out to others, if a
person were to have the emotional capacity to love, and a person would not employ
it in action, הרי הוא מכזיב
הצורה, ויאמרו עליו 'צורה נאה ומעשים כעורים', that person would be making a lie of our
form! They would say of such a person, “What a pleasant form, but what ugly
deeds!”[4]

Summary

Three
voices, three of the greatest minds Judaism has ever known. Not cherry-picked –
there are others I could bring. But three voices which unite to answer our
birthday question: The brilliant, inventive, moody, creative, ambitious,
bizarre creature that is the human being was put here on this planet on this
day, in order to help other people. In order to unite with others in empathy
and carry their burdens. In order to emulate Gd’s aid for Yishmael with
generosity, empathy and love for other human beings.

Of course,
a good derashah requires nuance; there must be another side of the coin, and
there is. We face two limits to our empathy: Biology, and Knowledge.

Limit
1: Biology

First,
biology – The saying goes, “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a
statistic.” We have trouble relating to too large a circle of human beings.

British
anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the brains of primates and the size of
their societies, and came up with a formula that predicted that human beings
would only form social networks of up to 150 or so people.[5]
Malcom Gladwell made the theory famous in his The Tipping Point, where
he marshalled evidence for it.

And it’s
not only Dunbar and Gladwell - halachah[6]
limits its demands upon our empathy. We have a principle of עניי עירך קודמים, that our tzedakah should go to our families first.[7]
Granted, that same talmudic passage includes the warning that those who only
help their own will soon find themselves in need of aid from others – still,
the rule is that our own do come first.

Another
example from halachah: The Torah describes our obligation to help others load
and unload their animals, and to restore their lost property. But the Torah
says כי תפגע, this is only when you encounter a need. The sages explained
that only upon encountering a need up close are we obligated to help;
they defined a distance limit of about 150 meters. Halachah is aware that we
respond best to what it calls ראייה
שהיא פגיעה,
to a personalencounter, and it does not obligate us to go
looking to help those we don’t know and we don’t see.[8]

So how can
Rav Chaim of Volozhin expect me to walk around all day thinking of helping
people? How can Rav Yerucham Levovitz expect me to carry the burdens of so many
people? How can Rav Moshe Cordovero demand that I emulate the Divine embrace for
everyone around me?

To this, I
respond with an article published in the New York Times this past summer, by
three research psychologists. Darryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht and William
Cunningham wrote a piece called Empathy is Actually a Choice.[9] They
said, “While we concede that the exercise of empathy is,
in practice, often far too limited in scope, we dispute the idea that this
shortcoming is inherent…We believe that empathy is a choice that we make
whether to extend ourselves to others. The ‘limits’ to our empathy are
merely apparent, and can change, sometimes drastically, depending on what
we want to feel.” And they demonstrated, with research studies, that humans
are actually designed with the ability to expand the empathetic capacity
of our hearts. Dunbar’s Number does not prevent us from expanding our hearts to
care about, and extending our arms to carry the burdens of, a world of human
beings.

Limit 2: Knowledge

The other
hypothetical limit is knowledge.

Here is a
powerful blog post I saw back in 2007. The writer is anonymous:

I write to you today as one of the Unseen. It hurts to not be seen. It
hurts even more to suffer alone and in silence. I have a mental illness… I hide
it well most of the time.
Today I did not hide it. I cried openly in shul… surrounded by some two hundred
people during the kiddush luncheon that followed, and still you did not see me.
I stumbled out of the social hall, blinded by tears I could not control and
sobs that left me unable to breathe, and still no one saw me.
I took refuge in the chapel and sobbed aloud… People came into the chapel for
various reasons: to look for a lost tallis, read the newspaper, find a book in
the library. Even still, I remained Unseen.
When my sobs exhausted themselves and I found my peace in emotional numbness, I
rose to leave the chapel, falling onto a chair in my weakened state. One man
remained in the chapel, facing me. He did not even bother to look up. I left
the chapel, Unseen.[10]

I don’t believe that people ignored a crying person
in shul because they didn’t care, and weren’t moved. Rather, I think it’s
because they didn’t know what to do. Perhaps they were afraid to make
her uncomfortable by approaching her. So they left the room.

But our ignorance is easy to eliminate – and looking
around our minyan, I see so many people who have taken the steps to do that,
who have become involved in chesed causes and who have pioneered chesed causes.
So we know how to eliminate ignorance: Good parents do research to learn how to
take care of their children. Good teachers study how to teach well. Good first
responders train in the latest CPR techniques. And good human beings, like us,
find out how to help other people.

Summary

This is
what we celebrate today: נעשה אדם!

·The Divine decision to populate His universe with the
brilliant, inventive, moody, creative, ambitious, bizarre creature that is the
human being.

·The Divine decision to create a human being who would
look to help others beyond Dunbar’s 150, beyond the halachic minimum of ראייה שיש בה פגיעה, as Rav Chaim Volozhin wrote.

·The Divine decision to create a human being who would
overcome ignorance and train herself to bear the burdens of others, as Rav
Yerucham Levovitz wrote.

·The Divine decision to create a human being who would emulate
Divine mercy and love and empathy, as Rav Moshe Cordovero wrote.

Shofar
The Talmud[11]
teaches that the shofar’s sound replicates different types of crying. These
might be our own cries of repentance before our King, but these may also be the
cries of other people – even the wicked mother of Sisera, as the gemara
teaches.[12] As
we fulfill this mitzvah momentarily and hear the moaning tekiah, the groans of
the shevarim, the shuddering teruah, let us expand our empathy, our image of
Gd, and ask ourselves whose cries we are hearing.

Who do we hear in the shofar?
Is it the panhandler at the corner of Bathurst and Steeles? Is it a socially
awkward person who is more easily ignored than greeted? Is it someone who lacks
a family and is rarely invited for a meal? Who do we hear crying with the
shofar? And what will we be moved to do about it?

·Let us hear the shofar and reach out because Rav Moshe
Cordovero says that is a fulfillment of our Image of Gd.

·Let us hear the shofar and reach out because Rav
Yerucham Levovitz says that’s what Judaism is for.

·Let us hear the shofar and reach out because Rav Chaim
of Volozhin says that’s why we were created on that first Rosh HaShanah.

Let us
hear the shofar and reach out as Gd did for Yishmael – and האדם ראוי שיתדמה לקונו, we can do it as well.

[8] Indeed, Shulchan Aruch
haRav Choshen Mishpat הלכות
עוברי דרכים וצער בעלי חיים 6
says explicitly that there is no obligation to help beyond this perimeter, even
if one knows of the other party’s need.

6 comments:

Rav Shimon Shkop has a very enlightening approach, finding a synthesis between self-interest and living a life focused on benefiting others.

But I wonder how many of us would actually be willing to accept the idea that the entire Torah enterprise is really to improve our ability to give to others? Esrog, davening, shofar, Torah study, even the mitzvos to love Hashem and to feel yir'as Shamayim -- all not ends in themselves?

Every mitzvah has an element of chesed, every mitzvah teaches you that there is something beyond yourself, especially study of Torah. Even the arba minim, you are holding the whole of the community together in your hands, bringing them together symbolically. If that doesn't lead you to want to reach out to other people, to heal the breaches and the divisions in the community, then maybe you are only holding three branches and a fruit.